Discovering Drupal One Hack at a Time
I’m learning a lot about Drupal putting this blog together. I briefly considered hiring a developer through oDesk to do it all for me, but decided that there was probably no better way to grok Drupal than to actually use it myself.
All in all, I’m impressed with that I’ve been able to accomplish so far. Here’s a quick rundown:
1) Signed up for a Godaddy.com hosting account.
2) Couldn’t get Godaddy hosting account to play nicely with my whatcott.com account registered elswhere. Registered jeffwhatcott.com/.net/.org as a last ditch effort to get a domain up.
3) Got the Godaddy crew to install Drupal for me (it took them a couple of days for some reason)
4) Got Drupal running and explored the admin UI for a while just clicking around seeing what different things do.
5) Started installing themes like a madman to find one I liked. It is SUCH A HUGE PAIN that Drupal.org does not have a rating or classification system for themes. Complete trial and error. Mostly error. None of the theme screen shot previews were working on Drupal.org for the period I was doing this, which was frustrating.
6) Eventually settled on the Maranelli theme. Figured out how to swap out the top image with one of my own.
7) Started installing modules like a mad man. CAPTCHA, RECAPTCHA, Google Analytics, Service Links, Trackback, Tagadelic, and probably many others.
8) I must have tried six different WYSIWYG editors before giving up and going with Markdown with Smartypants. It still apparently only implements a subset of Markdown (bulleted lists don’t seem to work).
9) Figured out that the Marinelli theme has a bug/feature that zeroes out the space between paragraph breaks. Fired up Dreamweaver, found the CSS, made the tweak, FTPed it up to the server and voila. I have no idea what the right mechanism would be for me to have committed my little change back to the downloadable version to prevent others from suffering the same issue, but it sure would have been nice to have an easy way to do so.
10) Got a comment from a reader that they wanted to be able to post their name when posting comments without being registered for my site. It took me a while to realize what he was asking for and it took even longer to realize that what we were really talking about was “contact information for anonymous users” that requires yet another comment moderation module AND a few tweaks to the permissions page. But now it finally appears to be working.
Whew! I’m sure I missed something in there. Overall, I have been able to work around most issues with a combination of contrib modules and google searching for how-to articles. Not bad for a non-engineer.
Here’s my punch list of additional things I need to get running on the site.
A) Get service links for Digg, technorati, etc. showing for users.
B) Implement email-based posting
C) Figure out if there is a way to get Utterz working in Drupal either directly or indirectly through aggregation.
D) Get a blog history block going. I have recent posts, but not history. Must be a module out there somewhere…
That was very interesting. I hope your blog gets on Planet Drupal soon. You have a very different perspective on a lot of issues that many people care about.
Btw, I reblogged your post about the Redmonk analysis because I think a lot of Planet Drupal readers will be interested: http://www.civicactions.com/blog/redmonksanalysisofacquiareblogged
Bevan/
Thanks Bevan. I hope my perspectives are helpful. There are a lot of things that can be done to make Drupal more accessible to new users. This is something I am rapidly building some real passion about.
Thanks for implementing the comments for anonymous users! I really hate to be forced into signing up to a site that I'll only casually be frequenting (i.e. most blog sites I visit).
You seem to be getting on with Drupal pretty well and I'm glad that a non-engineer (as you put it) has managed to get things pretty much worked out.
Let me add some response to a couple of your points:
9) Only the module maintainer can change code in CVS so you can't directly do that. The done thing is to create a patch and submit it to the issue queue. You can create a patch in terminal by issuing the following command:
diff -up original.css modified.css > ~/Desktop/name.patch
This will create a patch on your desktop that you can submit so it may be easily applied by the contrib maintainer.
D) Not sure if you have installed it yet but I believe Views is what you're after here. Views is an amazing module that allows the creation of custom lists of content. Check it out!
Thanks for the tips.
I’ve been meaning to delve into CCK and Views, but it feels like a definite step up in terms of complexity. I’ll check it out and report back what I find.
This is great for Drupal, someone approaching it from a new and no-experience perspective who has a little extra influence to help make things better!
And writing about each step of the way is so very important, because it’s hard to remember what held you up once you get past some obstacles. Keep it up!
You can preview the themes on Theme Garden so no need to install them first :)
markdown lists do work. markdown is great. see below:
email based posting is usually done with mailhandler module. that module works well with markdown if you write plain text emails.
blog history is usually done with Views. see the Archive block at angrydonuts
this captcha sucks. i have to pass the test each time i preview. and many times the words are illegible. wish someone did a better captcha :)
Hi, I just came across this in my Drupal research and wanted to let you know, Utterz.com now offers a connection to Drupal.
Happy Uttering!
regarding blog history box, are you talking about the one that gives you a list of previous blog posts like wordpress or blogger?
What is CCK? (something tells me it's a dumb question:D)
CCK is content construction kit. It's a Drupal module that allows you to easily created custom content types like press releases, rides, movie reviews, etc.
Thanks for the info. BTW I've marked it @ http://www.searchallinone.com/Other/Great_day_for_Drupal__Dries_Buytaert-4/
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